Librotraficantes blast bills as ethnic affront

Jacob Shafer, a member of the Librotraficantes, who are fighting to keep ethnic studies in public schools, speaks during a meeting with Mark S. Kavanaugh, committee director for Sen. Kel Seliger, at the state Capitol.

Tony Diaz, a Houston author and founder of the Libro-traficantes, likens two Texas bills to Arizona HB 2281, which dismantled the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson schools.

AUSTIN — The Librotraficantes, a Houston-based advocacy group that gained national attention last year when its members “smuggled” Mexican American Studies books into Arizona after the course was removed from Tucson schools, brought their fight to the state Capitol Thursday.

The group met with lawmakers in an effort to defeat two bills that would narrow which courses would count for American history credits in Texas universities and colleges.

Republican lawmakers filed bills amending a 1955 law so that only “comprehensive survey” American and Texas history classes would count toward core-credit requirements.

Representatives from the Librotraficantes, Spanish for “book traffickers,” said the bills are an affront to ethnic studies and other special topic courses, including those dealing with race and gender.

Group founder Tony Diaz was quick to liken the bills to Arizona HB 2281, which dismantled the Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District.

“I guess the lesson that we learned is that it's way easier to stop a law than to take it off the books,” Diaz said Wednesday.

Lawmakers did not return repeated calls for comment, and the Librotraficantes' meeting with Sen. Patrick's staff was not open to the media.

Both bills came after the release of a National Association of Scholars study that looked at 85 history courses at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University.

“What we were trying to do is determine how history is taught at the two major research universities in the state,” said Richard Fonte, a primary author of the study.

NAS is a coalition of academics that are concerned with “politicization of the classroom” and the “disappearance of core curricula,” according to the group's website.

Fonte balked at the assertion that the bills were meant to attack history courses dealing with race and gender, noting that the main issue with “special topic courses” is that they focus on a slice of the country or state's history and don't meet the broad or general education requirements under the law.

He noted that the report singled out a naval history course at Texas A&M that also failed to teach a “comprehensive survey” of history.

Jeremi Suri, a history professor at UT, said the association is being dishonest and that the bill's intent is to narrow the offerings to “a few courses that offer the history of a few white men.”

He said the bills would micromanage the role of university professors and fail to treat college students as adults.

V. June Pedraza, a Mexican American Studies professor at Northwest Vista College, said the language of the bill does not overtly target ethnic studies. But she added that in a subtle way, it minimizes the history of Mexican Americans, African Americans and other groups that have not been included in mainstream history coursework.

“We're fearful that the bill is going to give more power to the people that write the textbooks,” she said. “We're supposed to be in the history books, but we're not.”